Interpolation Theory
by AnotherBook
Summary: Hello, I'm the Doctor, and this is Grace. We travel through time and space, and we find trouble. Mostly. Sometimes we find other things. But mostly trouble. For instance, I'm probably in trouble right now because I just rhymed "Grace" with "space." And this is our shared diary. Part of the "Doctor Who: New Millenium" fan project. Posted by Erin.
1. This I Beheld (Or Dreamed It In A Dream)

Welcome to _Interpolation Theory_!

This is a collection of short stories, related to the _Doctor Who: New Millenium_ fan project (more information on the profile!), but which won't fit well into the episodes themselves, written to excise my plot demons while I'm supposed to be working on scripts. They'll also be published on the official "New Millenium" web site, when I get it up and running.

* * *

This is what you get when you're writing a script with Eight and are thinking about Ten being angsty. Blend for ten seconds and pour out onto paper. This is what you get.

Trigger warning for... sensory deprivation? Lack of informed consent? Surrealism?

I don't even know.

Hopefully you'll enjoy.

* * *

 **This I Beheld (Or Dreamed It In A Dream)**

Grace blinked. Where was she? She couldn't tell. Wherever it was, it was white, all white, too bright for her eyes to ever adjust… It wasn't the light. There was no light. No darkness, either. Just white. It might have been black or gray, come to think of it. It was simple, blank space, a psychic blank space—now where had she heard that before?

But there were messages, too. Writing, all over the four square walls. The floor, also, the ceiling too. There were no doors or windows; no furniture. Just messages.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME PLEASE PLEASE

Over and over again.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME

Grace blinked. It was all the same thing, somehow.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME PLEASE PLEASE FORGIVE ME CONDEMN ME HELP ME PLEASE

The messages were not, so to speak, in contrast to the walls, just as the walls were not any color, not even white or black, just mental blank space. Pure information, sorted by her mind into this form as her brain strove to make sense of the extra-sensory data. This whole room wasn't real, it was a simulation she had made for herself.

HELP ME STOP ME SAVE ME GRACE GRACE GRACE PLEASE LISTEN I'M TRYING TO TELL YOU JUST LET ME KNOW I NEED TO KNOW I NEED YOU I NEED YOU I NEED YOU

Grace blinked. Her mind was no longer assailed with the extra-sensory data, free to let her back into her own body, into what her senses were telling her. The Doctor stared back at her, his face pale, looking like one of those kids who'd been pulled off the street still trying to shake off the effects of a bad trip…

Was that all that had been? A bad trip?

Their hands were still linked, the cuts in their hands bleeding into each other, the obscene men who had forced them into this for the sake of their vile religion still lingering around the edges of the gray cell. Grace blinked, more slowly than before, her eyelids drifting closed and then open again. She saw the flash of recognition in his eyes.

Faster than human eyes could follow, with literally inhuman strength, the Doctor flipped the table over, heaving it through the mass of their captors and into the opposite wall. He gripped Grace's unwounded hand firmly, his still slick with blood, and pulled her from the room before the men could react.

Grace gently wrapped the Doctor's cut hand with gauze, despite the fact that it was already scabbing over by the time they got back to the TARDIS. She got up to put the medical kit away, but he snagged her sleeve neatly between two fingers. His blue eyes were mildly curious, completely guileless. "What did you see?" Grace shook her head and kept her mouth tightly shut.

Say what you might about secrets among friends, she thought. But she was too invested in the Doctor to tell him everything.


	2. Neverland

**Neverland**

Sometimes the quiet shocks me.

That there can be both such noise and cacophony, sheer volume of sound and happening, and also utter silence and stillness, bewilders me. The TARDIS is safe—a safe haven in all that weight of event and happenstance.

The Doctor is flopped over on the sofa on his stomach, reading. To look at him—now—you'd never believe that he was a corporeal being, with a pulse, needing air and rest and food and all the other million tiny comforts that humans have found indispensable over the years. All soft curls and baby blue eyes and charming smiles with perfectly white baby teeth, misdirection without substance. Just like Peter Pan. As captivating as Pan, just as bewildering, and coming out of a world of dappled sunlight and stunning blackness just as dangerous as Neverland.

How can you tell purpose and right from wrong when you're fighting those monsters? It just seems like such a fairy tale.

One day, though, I'm going to wake up and I'll be going on with my life just like Wendy, as if I had never glimpsed those tempting, deadly shores, and he will be gone, a mere memory, a childish story which no one will ever really believe. Because there is no home for Peter Pan, no homecoming, no origin, just a continuous genesis and regenesis out of the cold and dark.

Sometimes I see doubt in his eyes as he tells them, "I'm the Doctor." Or—not doubt. Questioning. As if he's asking them who he really is. He doesn't know. I don't think anyone does. As if he's trying to write his own destiny but isn't quite sure of the words.

Someday, there will be some other Wendy. I'll be forgotten. Hook can come out of the nightmare and claw him again and again, but the Doctor will never learn until at last he's broken.

Because that is the one difference between Pan and the Doctor. Pan can never die.

But someday, the Doctor will.

* * *

She thinks I don't realize that she's watching me, but I'm getting old. I can always tell when someone is thinking. The itch at the back of my head gets rather annoying, after a while. But I can't really tell _what_ she is thinking—I should not pry. I don't want to.

Is she wondering about the future—the future, her future, solid, when she leaves for good one day and goes on with the good life whose threads she will take up once again? Or is she just leaving it be, a train of thought to be pursued some other day?

Will she take up her life as if she had never left it, or will I have changed her? I pray that it won't have been for the worse, but what can I do? I see it, she's there, she's _wonderful_ , I can't help myself, I can't stay away—People. I need them. I get attached.

Caring isn't exactly a comfortable thing to do when you're going to outlive all your friends by a factor of about one point two _million_.

Because I _am_ getting old. I'm no longer naïve enough to believe that this can last forever, but I am determined to hold on to it while I can.

They're all going to leave, sooner or later. They're going to go back to the world they came from—get married, have kids. Maybe some of them belong to both Narnia and London, but sometimes I'm afraid that their time with me will be remembered as a faint and fantastic, distant dream.

Sometimes I wonder if I've only made it harder for them to face and fight the evils they're going to see in their own lives, because the ones I fight are so colossal, so fantastic. I can't deny that my way of fighting the monsters leaves a path of desolation—whether of physical, metaphorical, or legal form.

Perhaps I make it look too easy.

And one day, I will still be out there, in my future, and they will have all long since crumbled to dust—our timelines will no longer run parallel. The past will be closed to me. The past is always closed to me.

And that's why I run.

This is my curse.

And I can't help asking myself—what if, some day, I need someone there, and they aren't, because I am alone at the Ends of Time itself, the last man left in the universe before entropy breaks the borders and the last stars go out?

Will the invisible gates open out into a new vista, a bright new horizon, a far green country under a swift sunrise as the laws of physics rewrite themselves and reformat the universe anew in a renewing and second awakening?

Even if they do, I will never know, because I am a part of this old, expanding, cooling, fading universe, and my ashes will be needed to form the new soil of that reordering.

But that, indeed, is an encouraging thought. I would like that—for the dust—the stardust I'm made of—to one day become a part of something new. Maybe that is who I am. Perhaps that is the essence of the Doctor—stardust to stardust, but with a little hope thrown in.

But before that, I will have to be broken.

I am not Peter Pan. But everyone still leaves. Everyone still grows up.

And I am still the lure of the unknown, a siren call of risk and adventure. I shouldn't let them follow me, because I inevitably destroy them.

Yet, at the same time… they all still want to fly.


End file.
